A marketplace generally includes buyers who buy goods and sellers who sell goods. Examples of goods include books, cars, fruit, and so forth. One type of marketplace is a web advertising marketplace, such as real-time or spot market exchanges, an online marketplace, and so forth.
In the area of web advertising, a web advertising marketplace also includes buyers, sellers, and goods. However, in the web advertising marketplace, the goods sold include advertising space on a website, such as space for banner advertisements and other space that may be used for advertisements. The sellers sell advertising space on a website. The sellers are often referred to as “publishers,” because the sellers are “publishing” a website that includes the advertising space. The buyers are referred to as “advertisers” because the buyers are purchasing advertising space for the placement of advertisements. Advertisements may be referred to as “creatives.”
A web advertising marketplace may be generated by a “market-maker,” which is an entity (e.g., a company, a firm, an individual) that generates a marketplace for buying and selling of advertising space. For example, a market-maker may generate a website in which publishers can post listings of advertising space for sale and advertisers can post bids to purchase the advertising space from the publishers. A web advertising marketplace may be an automatic marketplace (e.g., a real-time auction), in which a publisher's “offer price” (e.g., a price a publisher is willing to accept for placement of a creative on the publisher's website) is matched in real-time with an advertiser's “bid price” (e.g., a price an advertiser is willing to pay to place a creative on the publisher's website). When an advertiser's bid price matches a publisher's offer price, the advertiser's creative may be automatically sent to the publisher for display on the publisher's website.
To promote the quality of creatives, a market-maker may allow a publisher to specify the types of content the publisher is willing to have displayed on the publisher's website. For example, a publisher may specify that the publisher only wants to display creatives that meet pre-defined criteria, including, e.g., creatives that do not include malicious software, creatives that do not include “cookie dropping” cookies that cause a user who visits a website to receive a third-party cookie from a different website, creatives that are smaller than a certain size limit, such as creatives having a download size that does not exceed fifty kilobytes of data, and so forth. In an example, pre-defined criteria also may include criteria that are specified by a market-maker, as well as other criteria defined across the web advertisement marketplace.